It’s difficult to write 800 words of new and unique insight regarding gun laws, school shootings, and our warped society. It’s all been said and I agree with the majority. To me, there is no mystery. Water is thicker than blood. Easy access to military-grade weaponry by every consumer in America is profitable and protected as a legitimate commercial industry, much like the deadly pharmaceuticals peddled on nightly television.
Freedom includes freedom to sell. No one upstairs is surprised by the mass murders. It’s part and parcel of the industry. It will be hard to fight this battle. Too much money is at stake. Restrictions are restricted. Permission is prepaid. Government officials are little more than corporate employees on diplomatic leave. It is us versus us.
Aye, me. What to do? We can educate people about ethics and morality, but we can’t teach them to hate money. Nor should we. Wealth is a virtue. Wealth brings happiness, leisure, adventure, opportunity. Fairly earned wealth brings intrinsic contentment. However, it also brings responsibility. The current belief that personal good is greater than the greater good is ill conceived.
We did eventually rein in the tobacco industry after millions died, but can we rein in the much bigger and more powerful weapons industry? I don’t know.
For so long people have been deluded into believing our country should be run like a business. Well, here we are. Business cares for the bottom line while people live on the bottom rung.
People of different persuasions want to debate current policies with me. I can’t do it. I don’t even enjoy the jokes anymore. The president consistently lies. He would not make a credible witness. He’s disqualified for me. Debating his shifting, slipping, sliding, improvised, professed policies would be like debating the shapes in shoreline clouds.
It’s worth remarking that for the most part men have caused these problems of warped ambition and acquisition, and now the women and children are rising up to put a stop to it, along with a good number of grandmas and the grandpas.
I refuse to believe we have tainted our future. I do believe we have royally screwed up our present, but we will get over it. Our current administration rolled in on a dupe and doesn’t reflect the majority’s expectations for our future. We are a peaceful embracing nation that solves problems with unity and collaboration. We will be that again. Out there are our nation’s new leaders. We can only hope that most of them will have humane ideals and concrete ideas. They may be outnumbered, but so were the athletes who won gold this year.
One good apple can feed off a bushel of bad apples as they rot. When it comes time for me to vote policy, I plan to vote for women and children first.
Now I’m done and I still have a bunch of space to fill. It would be wrong, journalistically foul, for me to pad my remarks and extend my opinions with extra adjectives and multiple examples. I must keep my nouns and verb together. To do otherwise would imply that my bottom line was my bottom line. Nay, ‘tis your pleasure I seek, so behold: more.
Teaching after the internet arrived in August 1991, we had one unified classroom stance whether you taught English, science or math, in California, Texas or New York, and it was this: Do Not Trust the Internet. It is unedited. Anyone can post anything anywhere.
A devious 12-year-old has the technical skills to create a professional looking Holocaust denial site. Kids, be smart. Be objective. Read a book. Get a second opinion. The blue in my face from that effort is only now beginning to fade.
Teachers also railed against plagiarism. “Kids, do not pass off ideas you find on the Internet as your own ideas. Think for yourself, critically. Know of what you speak.”
So, eh, what happened? What went wrong? All those years of teaching fact checking and Internet doubting, and they come away, graduate, and are duped by a devious foreign infiltration to alter the course of our nation. That is a pretty significant lesson unlearned.
Our real problem today is not fake news. It is fake doubt. Fake doubt is created to thwart decision making and stagnate any progress, like with climate change.
Then there is real doubt — the doubt of philosophers in their efforts to seek truth. We must once again learn to doubt anything that is uncertain, like the tweets of dolts and dingbats and their dumbass ideas. Doubt is scarier than blind obedience, and isolating if your peers don’t agree. To doubt can set one adrift when one might feel more comfortable being securely anchored. So be it.
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”  Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650)
“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
Andre Gide (1869 – 1951)

Steve Gibbs is a retired Benicia High School teacher who has written a column for The Herald since 1985.

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